Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

gizajob

This company is so beyond creepy and disgusting.

everdrive

Disgusting. Meta does not care about the harm they do so long as they make money.

gigel82

Fudge... we can de-flock all we want but if naive people walk around with the portable surveillance cameras on their face, there's nothing we can do about that. We need privacy regulation...

miltonlost

Hope they get sued out of existence for this by Illinois. The biodata stored and used only serves authoritarians.

KaiserPro

Former Facebook wanker, who worked in research. 1) we were always told and legal always pushed back hard on anything face detecting.(ie haar cascade "this is a face" let alone actual this is dave/sally) 2) the FTC would audit us to make sure we weren't doing that kind of stuff 3) all of the research prototypes had inbuilt/inline face removers up until 2024(I left after that so I don't know when/if that changed) 3.1) One of the very first things I worked on was face removal, it was a central core of the entire fucking project. Like if we didn;t have any of those constraints we'd have been 2 years ahead. 4) Stella is the name for v1 rayban stories, so its very odd that they get the update when they've not had any new features since for a long time(unless I am mistaken).

micromacrofoot

they finally wore down all the people internally who were against this

kstrauser

I'm in the position to make security policies at work, and one of them is that no smart glasses are allowed in the office. We will not be having workers aiming Facebook glasses at our screens showing confidential information. And along those lines, I can think of damn few scenarios where I'd be OK with someone using face recognition against me. Restaurants? It's not Facebook's business to know where I like to eat, presumably to sell ads to show to me. Music clubs? They don't need to know what I listen to. Anything vaguely resembling a public bathroom? Fuck right off with that. Public sidewalks? I don't want them tracking who I spend time talking to. No, I can't really think of any situation where I'd be remotely OK with this being used. To be blunt, I kinda hope this quickly turns not into just a public shaming against people wearing public spyware, but a situation where people are physically afraid to be caught wearing them outside. I think the branch of future possibilities where it's called out as antisocial behavior to poison public spaces like this would be a happier world than one where it becomes common behavior. Edit: In before the "do you ban cell phone cameras at work, too?" unclever gotcha: Yes. Yes, we'd definitely ban people spending the whole day holding their cell phone cameras up to their screens to record their work. We don't share confidential info with anyone other than vendors we've vetted and contracted with. If I walked by a desk and saw someone recording, I would pull them aside and explain why they're on thin ice.

j45

I wonder if people held their phones in the face of people recording with glasses if they'd be ok with it.

footy

_Careless People_ should be required reading for anyone buying this crap.

ChicagoDave

The number of times those get grabbed of someone’s face and stomped on will be greater than zero. And businesses will have signs for No guns/spyglasses.

pesus

This is incredibly creepy and invasive, and should be outlawed, frankly. There is no legitimate reason for this to exist. My only hope is regular Wayfarers aren't completely tainted by these creep glasses having the same design, but it may be too late.

bensyverson

They seem determined to make Chicago lawyers rich. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_Act

GrinningFool

Another case of really cool tech done badly. Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ... Then imagine that it wasn't tracked, recorded, saved, or tied into anything at all. Just a useful service, in service to only you. Thanks Meta et al, for pushing forward with this broken (for people) model of business and ensuring we'll never be able to have that.

airstrike

What a huge surprise coming from the company that records its own employees.

teeray

I fail to see how nonstop recording of every interaction with people in everyday life will pass muster in a two-party consent state.

altcognito

If Zuck could ship a set of 1950 x-ray glasses, they would. Never really grew up past middle school. I have dealt with high schoolers with better self control and moral compasses. The rest of SV billionaire class is so abhorrent that you figure they either enjoy being the villains or they figure "it's ok if you get away with it." Sociopaths.

RobotToaster

I wish something like this existed that was completely offline. I'm face blind (prosopagnosia) so being able to feed an offline database photos of friends so it can recognise them would be great. Accessibility shouldn't require giving up privacy.

filup

I can't think of one single practical use case for this that would benefit my life, because, right behind the glasses I have my very own locally available facial recognition built in.

Bender

Do these emit something unique that could be detected so that loud klaxon could let everyone know there is a glasshole approaching? Some unique bluetooth identifier perhaps?